Paper Plane Folding Machine Gun is a Mechanical Marvel

A German man has just finished a very impressive Paper Airplane Machine Gun, or a Papierflieger-Maschinenpistole, which just sounds so much cooler. It actually takes a stack of paper, folds it into paper air planes and shoots them.

The device takes a stack of what looks like post-card size paper in the “clip”, forms them into paper air planes by a series of rollers and folding edges and then launches them out of the end. A cheap electric screwdriver powers the entire drive train, which allows him to shoot around 20 planes per minute (PPM?).

Sadly there’s really not too much information on how it works, nor the files to reproduce it. [Papierfliegerei], as he goes by on YouTube, decided to build this awesome contraption to show off just what 3D printers are capable of these days. He designed the whole thing in 3D CAD and had many of the parts printed off at a 3D printing company called fabberhouse.de, while the rest of the components are off the shelf.

This is a nice video to research viral distribution thru the interwebs as it uses an unique term to search for and just went viral after over half a year out of nothing. The video got “that unique thing” that leads people to share it. There must be something like a “critical mass” of attention?

You mean “if you see video which shows that this gun doesn’t fold planes, you will believe that it folds planes”. Also, please see video linked in article. It looks like it indeed does fold those planes from plain sheets of paper.

The only modification this thing needs is a more precise paper pickup at the start – we’ve got printers that can reliably grab a sheet off the stack every time, shouldn’t be that hard to adapt their designs or actual hardware to make this thing more reliable.